Commerce is one of the daughters of Fortune, inconstant and deceitful as her mother. She chooses her residence where she is least expected, and shifts her abode when her continuance is, in appearance, most firmly settled.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures, its excesses must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.

If it be asked, What is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason but by desirean expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

Make it an invariable and obligatory law to yourself never to mention your own mental diseases. When you talk of them, it is plain that you want either praise or pity; for praise there is no room, and pity will do you no good.

Nothing amuses more harmlessly than computation, and nothing is oftener applicable to real business or speculative inquiries. A thousand stories which the ignorant tell and believe die away at once when the computist takes them in his grip.

Pleasure preconceived and preconcerted ends in disappointment; but disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

Poverty is often concealed in splendour, and often in extravagance. It is the care of a great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every-day is lost in contriving for to-morrow.

Sudden blaze of kindness may, by a single blast of coldness, be extinguished; but that fondness which length of time has connected with many circumstances and occasions, though it may for a while be suppressed by disgust or resentment, with or without cause, is hourly revived by accidental recollection.

Surely it is better to enclose the gulf and hinder all access, than by encouraging us to advance a little, to entice us afterwards a little further, and let us perceive our folly only by our destruction.

Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends upon the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force though shot by a child.

That voluntary debility, which modern language is content to term indolence, will, if it is not counteracted by resolution, render in time the strongest faculties lifeless, and turn the flame to the smoke of virtue.

Truth has no gradations; nothing which admits of increase can be so much what it is as truth is truth. There may be a strange thing, and a thing more strange; but if a proposition be true, there can be none more true.

Whatever be the cause of happiness, may be made likewise the cause of misery. The medicine which, rightly applied, has power to cure, has, when rashness or ignorance prescribes it, the same power to destroy.

When any fit of anxiety, or gloominess or perversion of the mind, lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints, but exert your whole care to hide it; by endeavouring to hide it you will drive it away.